AMD Sempron 2800+ & 3100+ Review
HH Test Bed & Sandra
 |
|
HOW WE CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEMS:
We tried to ensure that all of our test systems were configured as similarly as possible for this review. Both the Sempron and the P4 systems were equipped with identical hardware, with the obvious exceptions being the motherboards and processors. The video cards, hard drives, driver versions (where applicable), and OS configurations were identical. Before we started benchmarking, we entered the system BIOS and set each board to its "optimized defaults." We then configured our RAM to run at 333MHz (DDR333) with system 1 and system 2 because the nForce2 has a top speed of 333MHz on the memory, with the timings set by SPD. Additionally, the video memory was configured for 64MB/sec, with an Aperture size of 128MB/sec on the systems with integrated graphics per AMD's request. With systems 3 and 4, both were configured for DDR400 with an Aperture size of 256MB/sec.
The hard drives were then formatted and Windows XP Professional (SP1) was installed. When the installation was complete, we hit the Windows Update site and downloaded all of the available updates, with the exception of the ones related to Windows Messenger and Media Player 9. Then we installed all of the necessary drivers and removed Windows Messenger from the system altogether. Auto Updating and System Restore were disabled, as well, and we set up a 768MB permanent page file on the same partition as the Windows installation. Lastly, we set Windows XP's Visual Effects to "best performance," installed all of our benchmarking software, defragged the hard drives, and ran all of the tests.
| System 1: AMD Sempron 2800+ (2.0GHz) ASUS A7N8X-VM/400 NVIDIA nForce 2 2X256MB Kingston PC3500 Integrated Graphics Onboard 10/100 Ethernet Onboard Audio Western Digital 30GB 7200RPM Windows XP Pro SP1 NVIDIA Unified Driver v4.27 NVIDIA ForceWare v61.76 DirectX 9.0b |
System 2: Intel Pentium 4 @ 2.4GHz ASUS P4R800-V Deluxe ATI IGP 9100 Chipset 2X256MB Kingston PC3500 Integrated Graphics Onboard 10/100 Ethernet Onboard Audio Western Digital 30GB 7200RPM Windows XP Pro SP1 ATI Chipset All-In-One v7.991 Catalyst v4.7 DirectX 9.0b |
System 3: AMD Sempron 3100+ (1.8GHz) EPoX EP-8KDA3+ nForce3 250Gb 2X256MB Kingston PC3500 NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 XT Onboard 10/1000 Ethernet Onboard Audio Western Digital 30GB 7200RPM Windows XP Pro SP1 NVIDIA Unified Driver v4.27 NVIDIA ForceWare v61.76 DirectX 9.0b |
System 4: Intel Pentium 4 @ 2.4GHz ABIT AI7 865 Motherboard Intel 865 Chipset 2X256MB Kingston PC3500 NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 XT Onboard 10/1000 Ethernet Onboard Audio Western Digital 30GB 7200RPM Windows XP Pro SP1 Intel Chipset Drivers v6.0.1.1002 NVIDIA ForceWare v61.76 DirectX 9.0b |
SiSoft Sandra 2004
AMD Sempron 2800+
;)
;)
;)
;)
AMD Sempron 3100+
;)
;)
;)
;)
In both CPU and Multimedia modules, the Sempron 2800+ shows signs of being a competitive processor. It offers up a challenge to all of the reference processors except for the Pentium 3.2GHz. With the Sempron 3100+, we saw dominant performance potential, although unlike the 2800+, the results for the Multimedia Module were less than impressive. With the Sempron 3100+'s on-die memory controller, the processor returned the best memory scores overall.
As we all know, synthetic tests are a quick tool to assess how a piece of hardware should perform compared to its peers. Next, we're going to focus primarily on CPU-intensive tasks to see how the new Semprons from AMD stack up.
